Gwenny June
Page 33
Chapter 34 – Retirement Weighs Heavily
Pmirhs Stirg sat on the dock of the bay watching time go by. It was his very long and substantial private dock, stretching out into Charleston Harbor, from which in the distance he could see the six flags flying over Fort Sumter. He always liked that sight. He was a patriotic sort of person, and respected patriotism no matter what country it was directed at. The dock was part of what now was a $6 million piece of property; now that he had renovated the old Navy structure into his private residence, and fixed the dock, and built the guest house back where the dock connected to the historic district of Charleston. A lot of people would be happy sitting there, relaxing, enjoying the view, knowing they were wealthy, but Stirg was unhappy, dissatisfied, and brooding. He knew it was wrong to feel this way, that he should be content; but he wasn’t. He was pissed at Roger and Gwen June.
Nev sat next to him with a fishing pole, trying to fish. He didn’t know how, but he was trying. He had grown up in the desert of Israel, not on the coast. What Nev should have done was to call up Little Jinny Blistov and ask him for advice about fishing. Jinny was a short man, and so there never was much chance of him feeling vertigo due to his head being very far from the ground. He got this physical trait from his mother, who was 4 foot 11 inches tall. Jinny knew a lot about fishing because he had learned it from his mother and her side of the family. They were fishermen who would row small boats out of St. Petersburg harbor into the North Sea. They could row out there for days, eating raw fish and drinking rainwater. When there were no fish around and they got bored, they would strip naked, tie the boat’s lines around their waists, jump overboard, and have swimming races while towing the boats behind. All of them were short, but very strong, no fat anywhere. His mother was so strong she could tear the heads off of fish with her bare hands.
If Nev had called Jinny and asked him to come over for a little fishing off the dock, Jinny would have been there is a minute. But Nev didn’t know about Jinny’s skill in this department, and probably wouldn’t have called him if he did know. Nev wasn’t too thrilled about the part Jinny played in the June’s invasion of the Stirg home, being suckered by four women in bikinis, being tied up and forced to watch his boss be humiliated like that. Him a commando. Former commando, now possibly over the hill in that department. He wondered if he was over the hill in the bodyguard department, too. That would be bad. What else could he do to earn a living? He remembered Jinny pointing Stirg’s Russian made Brusshev at him, sitting in a chair with his feet tied together. He decided for the tenth time he didn’t like Jinny, or any of that Charleston crowd. Formerly Saint Petersburg crowd, now Charleston crowd. He would rather sit with no fish in his bucket than ask Jinny for help.
Stirg was brooding about Anna and the artifacts. One minute he was incensed that a couple of Americans had stolen Russian heritage items, and the next minute he was incensed that his granddaughter now was living with these Americans. He knew she was living with the Rodstras, but his mind played games, telling him she really was with the Americans. It wasn’t like him to brood. Always he had been a man of action; figure out what to do, then go do it. Take risks. Here he was, sitting on his dock, watching the Sumter flags flap and snap in the wind. The day before he had tried to change his mood by walking up King Street with Nev to the College of Charleston campus. He sat under the old trees, surrounded by old brick walls, and watched the coeds, but even this didn’t make him feel good. The stirrings weren’t there. The stirrings certainly were there in Nev, who was going crazy, surrounded by what was nothing less than rampant, flagrant nubility. This was lots better than fishing and not catching anything. But Stirg just didn’t feel well. He wanted to kill the Americans and the Russian traitors, and get the goods back. And he wanted to chase young women. His problem was that he couldn’t figure out how to do either. His mind wasn’t working the way it used to. He had blockage.
Somewhere under his conscious thinking he knew the problem was Anna, and not the artifacts or the Americans or the traitorous Russians, and in that same place he knew he couldn’t do anything about it. It was Anna’s decision to go to them. She was adult enough for him to point her on a mission, and he knew she was adult enough to decide how to live her life. But this knowledge was not at the surface of his mind. He couldn’t access it at the conscious level, and was stuck with a mind playing tricks on itself, side-stepping reality. Anna had been his touchstone since retiring from active duty, first from Nazi hunting, and then from international lawyering. Now, she was moving on. He looked over at Nev, sitting on the dock and thinking he would have better luck fishing with his handgun than this stupid pole. Nev’s mind wasn’t what it used to be, either.